Brothertown Indian Nation
Photo by David Cournoyer
Over the course of a memorable long weekend in high school, Heather Heckler found her future career. Always adept in math and science, Heckler was invited to a program at the University of Wisconsin–Platteville designed to expose girls to the field of engineering.
The program gave Heckler insights and hands-on experience in four types of engineering: mechanical, civil, electrical, and industrial. In many ways, the most valuable aspect of the weekend was realizing what she didn’t want to pursue. “I realized I didn’t want to be on the construction site all the time as a civil engineer, and electrical engineering was all about the levers and switches and details that make the circuits work,” recalls Heckler, this year’s winner of the Blazing Flame award.
Industrial engineering came up as the right combination of math and science and helping people. “Industrial engineering focuses more on the people side of things,” Heckler says. “It looks at the processes and people to see what we can do to make it all more efficient and help people work to the highest of their capabilities.”
Over the course of her multi-decade career at General Motors, Heckler has worked at improving the processes and supporting the people involved with vehicle manufacturing. Now a lead industrial engineer at GM, Heckler has also spent a tremendous amount of time and effort making GM a more attractive and welcoming place for Indigenous people.
“We needed to build a relationship and demonstrate that we care — not just show up. There is a distrust of large organizations because they have polluted some Native communities and because promises made haven’t been kept.”
Heckler’s own experience as an Indigenous employee from the Brothertown Indian Nation has been somewhat contradictory. Before arriving at GM, she had done little to explore her own heritage. After starting, Heckler rotated through different departments to become familiar with how the company functions. In one of those assignments, she met a colleague who kickstarted her own education about her Native culture. “This gentleman said, ‘You’re Native American, aren’t you?’” Heckler recalls. “That was the first time anybody had acknowledged it, and he brought a book to me the next day all about my tribal history and the history of other tribes in Wisconsin. That was the start of my journey.”
Even as Heckler was discovering her roots, she came to realize that GM was not making a proactive effort to recruit Native students and that there was a casual acceptance of culturally insensitive remarks. Heckler set about addressing recruitment as the president of GM’s Indigenous Peoples Network and sensitivity through extensive internal education. For instance, in 2012 GM proposed discontinuing its presence at the AISES National Conference because the effort wasn’t yielding many hires. But Heckler countered that there were reasons GM’s attendance wasn’t effective. “We needed to build a relationship and demonstrate that we care — not just show up,” Heckler says. “There is a distrust of large organizations because they have polluted some Native communities and because promises made haven’t been kept. We had to figure out how to have a consistent presence and build a relationship with the organization and any students coming in.”
GM has taken big steps toward those goals by offering learning opportunities for attendees and by sending the same representatives to the National Conference each year to build personal relationships with students as they make their way toward graduation.
Internally, Heckler has also pushed to make changes that ease the pathway to GM for Native students, including eliminating GPA as a metric for recruitment. The rationale is simple: many recruits have deceptively low GPAs in college because the transition to campus life can be challenging. And even if they maintain high grades for most of their college career, it’s difficult to bounce back from those initial struggles.
Heckler has also had a lot of success educating co-workers about Native cultures and what it means to be culturally sensitive — which includes eliminating from acceptable company vernacular terms like “having a powwow” in reference to a meeting. “Everyone has been open to learning,” Heckler says. “It has been about educating the GM workforce that there are Indigenous people at GM. People don’t realize that because schools don’t really teach that we are still here after 1900. It’s about letting them know who we are and that we still exist — and are proud of who we are and where we come from.”
Waccamaw Siouan
Photo by Khinsley Locklear Portraiture
Ashley Lomboy didn’t know it at the time, but her devotion to serving others began when her grandmother asked her to help at church. Lomboy would sweep floors, fetch cold drinks for elders, and basically do whatever she could to help those around her. “They call it volunteering now,” says Lomboy, a winner of this year’s Indigenous Excellence Award. “The biggest thing that was instilled in me was the importance of helping others with no expectation of getting something in return.”
It’s an understatement to say that Lomboy took the lesson about service to heart. Indeed, today much of her
life revolves around empowering her other Waccamaw Siouan tribal members with STEM skills that will help them build better lives and, importantly, with knowledge about her tribe’s unique history and culture. Besides her full-time job as global information security manager for Corning Corporation, Lomboy founded and runs (as a volunteer) the North Carolina–based Waccamaw Siouan STEM Studio, which delivers opportunities and education to tribal youth and their families.
In developing programs for the studio, Lomboy has found that there is often a strong connection between STEM and the preservation and revitalization of her culture. “Waccamaw Siouan people started losing the grounding about who they are,” Lomboy says. “So during the pandemic, when we had so many elders passing away, we started a project where we collected oral stories and written documentation from our elders and put them on YouTube. It was a way for our people to virtually sit with an elder and learn about their stories and struggles and what they had to share about our people.”
“I enjoy the constantly changing landscape of technology and the problem- solving it demands,” Lomboy says. “Technology is never the same from day to day.”
It’s one of a long list of projects and programs that the STEM studio delivers to benefit young people from North Carolina’s eight tribes. For example, Lomboy hosts a STEM Day for kids between five and 18 at the Waccamaw Siouan tribal grounds. At the free event, children can try their hand at robotics, fossil identification, bridge building, snake and wildlife research, and other activities and take home a STEM kit with science and math activities.
In providing ways for Native youth to learn about STEM and their culture, Lomboy is providing opportunities she didn’t have growing up in the same area. “I’ve always been very curious,” Lomboy says. “I always have wanted to surround myself with people who encourage me to grow, and that is sometimes hard to find in Native country. Sometimes you need to leave and come back to make a real difference.”
Which is exactly what Lomboy did. She spent about eight years in the U.S. Army, including helping to provide communication support during Operation Iraqi Freedom. While in the military, Lomboy honed her technology skills, serving as a system and server administrator, automations officer, and senior LAN manager. Lomboy’s military service and subsequent career working for General Dynamics and Boeing took her far from her North Carolina roots.
In 2016 she decided it was time to go home, which meant quitting her job and moving from Seattle to North Carolina. “I had my second son and wanted to come back and raise my kids closer to my community,” Lomboy says. About a month after moving home, Lomboy landed the job she still holds today, global information security manager for Corning. Lomboy’s career in technology has helped satisfy her endless curiosity. “I enjoy the constantly changing landscape of technology and the problem-solving it demands,” Lomboy says. “Technology is never the same from day to day.”
Lomboy hopes that her work with STEM Studio and other projects provides opportunities for Native youth, including her own children, to pursue STEM or simply develop skills and curiosity that will help them build meaningful lives. “Opportunity means you get a choice. If you never get the opportunity, you don’t even have a choice,” Lomboy says. “I have to believe that the work I’m doing and the time I’m spending is also for my family because I wanted to create a space where my kids could learn alongside other Native children and not feel inferior but like they’re walking into a place that celebrates who they are. That is what really fills my cup.”